Copyright and Legal Images

Copyright 

Yes, I can hear some of you saying: "What?! Why do we have to waste our time with this legal stuff?" Well, although it always mattered to some extent, it is crucial information when you start posting material to the internet! 

It would be irresponsible on my part not to present this material. Copyright infringement could lead to very costly fines, serious financial losses for your employers, and most probably losing your job. Yes, the probability of your being caught is rather small, but the cost of being caught could be catastrophic. (Actually, it's similar to many governments' 2019 view of the possibility of a world-wide pandemic. How did that turn out?)

After the course, you can decide what to do with your new knowledge: Push the DELETE button or use the easy ways I will offer you to navigate this legal minefield.

Basic Terms & Concepts:

Here is a list of basic terms and concepts in outline format. The videos will fill in the details and present various views about those details.

Copyright vs. Public Domain

• Copyright is the total legal control over the use of material like text, music, dance, images, etc.

• Public Doman is all the material that no longer is copyrighted or could never be copyrighted in the first place. 

Duration of copyright:

• Originally: 14 years, renewable (Statute of Anne - 1710)

• Now: creator's life plus 70 years (or 120 years for corporate creations)

"Fair Use": The acceptable infringement of copyright (with limitations) for teaching, research, news reports, critical interpretation, and parody 

The four criteria of Fair Use:

• Nature of the original

• Nature of the copy (This includes the question: Is the new work derivative or transformative?) 

• Amount of the original used

• Negative impact on the market value of the original

The dangers for teachers and students: 

• Lawsuits to "set an example"

• Cost of proving Fair Use

• Copyright trolls (i.e., lawyers, and others, searching the Internet for copyright infringement)

• The danger of "Three Strike Rule" on YouTube and in other media in some countries

Creative Commons: sharing within copyright  

• See the list of CC licenses at Flickr.com - Click here.

Very different views to confound teachers: 

Please watch the video entitled "Copyright on Campus." (You might have to scroll down the page a bit to get to the video.) Look at the page that this video is on and examine its copyright limitations. Then watch the following video.

Creative Commons

Larry Lessig and other law professors created "Creative Commons" to legally share material within copyright law. Here's a Kiwi explanation:

As copyright protection has been growing over time, at the expense of the public domain, copyright enforcement has taken different forms, at different levels of intensity. For about a decade, the entertainment industry (the RIAA - Recording Industry Association of America, the MPAA - Motion Picture Association of America, and the individual corporations) searched out and sued everyone and anyone infringing on copyright. This was seen as an educational policy  for the American public (as well as a source of additional income for the entertainment industries). Legal firms were set up to find and intimidate infringers with letters demanding $5,000 (or more) to settle the infringement cases out of court. Please watch the satirical video that "Weird Al" Yankovic posted entitled: "Don't Download This Song." (The song is optional, but the lyrics and graphics are brilliant! It's worth the watch!)

At one point, the entertainment lobby convinced the U.S. government to have customs inspectors search airline passengers for digital content that infringed on copyright protection (instead of spending their time looking for weapons and other contraband). The wrath of hundreds of thousands of weary travelers soon reversed this policy.

Currently, the entertainment industry is aiming at institutions (libraries, schools, colleges, universities, etc.) to force them to keep their network users in line with the law. One obvious result is a rash of overly-conservative policies about photocopying course materials for classes. 

Another development is the use of copyright claims to further the legal battles that have nothing to do with copyright per-se. If a corporation is suing someone, or some other corporation, why not add a copyright claim, just to cover all the bases? Luckily, the courts have not been too pleased with this waste of time.

But ultimately, what is the probability of you, as an EFL teacher, of being caught up in a copyright case? Originally, the answer would have been "minimal," but the probability is growing due to the development of online tools to catch copyright infringement. Besides the algorithms that YouTube (and other platforms) have developed to check images and music, there are tools like this:  

Please click here for more information about Copyright issues. OPTIONAL, but recommended.

In addition, click here for the videos of the Crash Course about Intellectual Property. This material is optional, but highly recommended. In particular, videos #2 and #3 deal with copyright.

AI and Copyright

In general, widespread use of AI is so new in the world, that the courts have not decided many cases about it. At the moment, it would appear that "normal people" won't get sued by using material produced by AI.  On the other hand, in the last few years, some artists have brought cases against image-oriented AI companies for stealing their style. The complained that people could get images "in the style of <name of artist>, which were not pictures that the artist actually created, but if they had created them, they could have received financial benefit. Notably, in closing days of 2023, The New York Times filed a copyright case against OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) for two types of copyright violations. The first is the fact that OpenAI "trained" ChatGPT on millions of copyrighted articles of the paper. The second is that people can use ChatGPT to get around the paper's paywall and get articles for free. This case is a very big deal for AI and journalism in the future. You can hear more from minute 04:40 to minute 30:13  of this 5 January 2024 Hard Fork podcast episode at https://overcast.fm/+m_rqlSq_I (optional).  Use the fast-forward 30-seconds icon to move to minute 04:40. 

Copyright in Israel

In regard to copyright, Israeli law, as in many (most?) countries, follows the standards of the law in the United States. Most countries in the world have ratified international agreements about copyright and tend to follow the country with the "strongest" copyright model. In most cases, because of the political influence of the American entertainment and publishing industries, that is the United States. (Ah, the joys of unfettered capitalism!)

Click here for a document about Israeli copyright law (2007). Glance at it. Reading it all is OPTIONAL.

REQUIRED READING:

Please read this letter from the Ministry of Education from 16 November 2020.

Still Images

For teaching ELLs, the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words." can actually mean: A picture can generate a thousand words, and on many levels!

Please download the following file as a PowerPoint presentation (rather than viewing it in Google) in order to see all the visual effects. For ELLs, the PowerPoint presentation focuses on questions to encourage discussions, as well as adjectives, comparisons, and superlatives.   

PowerPoint: Using Images for ELLs - Click here.

(For best viewing, download the original PowerPoint presentation. In Google Slides, click on FILE > DOWNLOAD > POWERPOINT. Then click on the "Slide Show" icon [the screen at the bottom]. While you are examining the PowerPoint presentation, note the attributions under each picture!)

Stay Legal!

Returning to the issue of copyright, you can assume that every item on the internet is owned by someone and that the owner(s) will probably want to protect their copyright. The major exceptions to this rule are:

• Items that are so old that they fell out of copyright (perhaps pre-1925 or even pre-1890?)

• Items whose copyright owners placed the items in the Public Domain.

• Items that never had copyright protection, like all publications of the US government (including all those fantastic space photos from NASA).

To avoid getting caught with copyright infringement claims, always use images and other items that are Public Domain or have a Creative Commons license!  Go to https://search.creativecommons.org/ for a multi-media search for Creative Commons items.

Probably the easiest place to find an image that you want (or close to it) is in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.com. Make sure you are in www.flickr.com/creativecommons (and not in the general Flickr.com collection).  The Flickr page with the image will have the phrase: "Some rights reserved" towards the bottom of the web page, to the right (unless it's totally Public Domain). If the page says "All rights reserved" and has a copyright icon, then you have slid over into the regular section of Flickr or the owner has changed the status of the image. (You are not liable for infringement claims if you used an image when it had a Creative Commons license and then reverted back to full copyright.)

An easy way to stay in the Creative Commons section is to access each image in a new tab (with a right click on your mouse). That way, the original search results (in the Creative Commons section) are "in the background" (i.e., in another tab).  

Please watch the following tutorial, made with Screencast-O-Matic.

Alternatives to Flickr

Pixabay is an alternative to Flickr for free images and videos. Pixabay is at: https://pixabay.com/ . Make sure you stay in the free section. It's very easy to fall into the iStock section, which is commerical.

Although Pixabay says that you don't have to attribute the owner of the image, it's always a good idea to do so - just to prove that your image is legal.

Another collection of free images is Pexel at: https://www.pexels.com/ . Pexel will often send you to Pixabay, but it does have a large number of other free images. Just make sure that it says "Free for use" right under the image. Once again, the best practice is to give attribution with a link to the image's Webpage.

A Good Way of Using Pictures to Encouraging Oral Production

Please watch this short video by Russell Stannard about using pictures to encourage oral production. Towards the end of the video he uses Screencast-O-Matic (now called "Screenpal," a digit tool we learned about earlier in the course. 

Homework:

Please note: Late homework will be penalized 20% of the initial grade. Your first post is worth 60% and the second post (a meaningful response to some one else) is worth 40%.  

1. Using the Creative Commons section of Flickr.com (or some other Creative Commons source), find  a good image for your teaching.  Look below and to the right of the image on the Flickr page and make sure there is a Creative Commons icon and the words "Some Rights Reserved." Download that legal image and SAVE it in your local computer, with a logically-named file name, in a logically-named sub-folder. IN ADDITION: COPY the URL of the specific Web page of the image and PASTE that image on a WORD doc. You will need the URL for attribution of your chosen image.

DID YOU CHECK UNDER THE IMAGE, TO THE RIGHT, TO MAKE SURE IT WAS LEGAL?

DID YOU CHECK UNDER THE IMAGE, TO THE RIGHT, TO MAKE SURE IT WAS NOT COPYRIGHTED?

DID YOU CHECK UNDER THE IMAGE, TO THE RIGHT, TO MAKE SURE IT HAD A CC ICON?

(If you are getting tired of these questions, think of how tired I get of seeing copyrighted images in the homework!!)

2. In Lesson 10 discussion forum in MOODLE, upload a copy of the legal image from the folder in your computer (i.e., Do NOT COPY and PASTE it from the WORD doc! If you do, the image will disappear.) In addition, PASTE the URL of the image's Flickr page into the text field of the post. This URL should bring the user back to the original Web page of the image. (After you post the message, please check that it does.)

3. In the text area of the message, briefly explain why you chose that particular image and how you might use it in teaching EFL.

4. In addition, in your initial Lesson 10 forum post, please briefly review what had you known about copyright before this session. Then explain if your new knowledge of copyright will influence your teaching in the future? Why/Why not? How? Has your opinion of copyright changed? Why/Why not? How? 

BTW, DID YOU CHECK UNDER THE IMAGE, TO THE RIGHT, TO MAKE SURE IT WAS LEGAL?

5. Read all the posts about copyright and REPLY to at least one student in each.